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Comment by badminton1 | Hacker News Reader

More people are learning German in the EU now, and now there is also Brexit, which removes English as an official language there. Simultaneously, the role of the UK as a trade hub will be heavily diminished. I would not be surprised if in 50 years German surpassed English in the EU.

China is heavily investing on Africa, so I would not be impressed if Africans start learning Mandarin more actively than they do now. African population is the one experiencing the fastest growth at the moment.

In the Americas, I would expect things to remain more or less the same.

Historically, the Chinese have been very hermetic when it comes to foreign policy. Chinese yuans (RMB) are not as liquid as dollars, and that seems intentional as they want to keep tight control of their currency value. But they do seem more expansive recently... opening overseas military bases in Djibouti, etc.

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I am not sure where you saw that German is the most popular language being learned in the EU.

The following report from the French ministry of education from 2014 (in french unfortunately) [1] states that in Europe, 94% of the students study english as a foreign language (high school and university). Then comes French (23%) and German and Spanish (19% each).

As for Brexit, I don’t think english is used as the main working language in the EU because of the UK’s infuence, just because it is the foreign language most people speak.

[1] http://www.education.gouv.fr/cid74880/l-apprentissage-des-la...

Only if you count the recent wave of a million illegal immigrants, otherwise German remains difficult and not so popular to learn. If you disagree, please provide a source.

From my own experience (I speak/write in 5 different languages and live in Germany since 2011), it takes between 5 to 10 years to learn German minimally. Other Western European languages are simpler to learn and more popular: Spanish, English, Portuguese, French.

Much of the difficulty is not at knowing the German vocabulary and pronunciation. It is simply that the language is very strict in its written and spoken form. By comparison, other western languages had global exposure over the centuries and today are fitting like a shoe to the native speakers of other languages, so the learning curve is far less steep.

Linguists don't really believe in objectively easy or difficult languages. Subjective difficulty depends on your interests and what languages you already know.

As a Norwegian, I found German far easier to learn than English, French and Spanish.

Hmm. It seems clear that where you start from plays a role. At the same time, it seems obvious that Latin grammar (3 genders, 6 cases, 4 verb conjugations, 5 noun declensions, multiple moods etc) is more complex than Italian... or am I wrong?

> At the same time, it seems obvious...

English: "My wife sent me an email", but "My wife sent an email to me".

Yes, very obvious :)

LOL, I got a downvote. I didn't know there is a "Party against Grammatical Cases" on HN :)

It also depends on where you are going. If your goal is native fluency including clean pronunciation and grammar I find most languages equally hard. (Have mastered or had runs at 7 other than English.)

To your second point, Latin inflections are for the most part very mechanical, even for verbs. Latin is difficult to master due to the fact that it's for the most part only read. It's far easier to gain fluency if you develop an active vocabulary through speaking and writing.

If you are looking for objectively hard things to master I would pick German noun gender or Japanese Kanji. They both require rote memorization of thousands of items. Both have relatively weak patterns to cut down the amount of cases you need to memorize.

Linguists don't really believe in objectively easy or difficult spoken languages. Written language is a different thing, and the difficulty of learning Chinese characters will be a drag on international acceptance in the scientific community.

Everyone thinks thier language hard, with strict rules and pronuciation. Those who teach english, or any language, always focus on rules. In reality, rules matter little to anyone outside classrooms. The ESL students in my class always pointed out my "mistakes", only for me to point out the same techniques being used by the great speakers and writers of history. During years of learning english nobody told them that if you speak well enough, you can do as you wish with rules.

> which removes English as an official language there

That's not true. The republic of Ireland and Malta (and possibly more) still have English as an official language.

Actually neither of them has English as their "official" language in the EU because you only get to pick one, and they both want to promote native languages (Irish and Maltese) instead.

Now there's a funny game of chicken to see if one of them will blink and switch to requesting English in the EU: https://www.politico.eu/article/english-will-not-be-an-offic...

But as a matter of practicality, I'm sure English will continue to be used as a working language across European institutions.

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